Can energy independence help solve the economic crisis?
Five million green jobs. One million hybrid cars on the road. Some $150 billion in clean-energy investment. Eighty percent fewer carbon dioxide emissions.
These are just some of the promises made by President-elect Barack Obama during the long presidential campaign. He is now focused sharply on the nation’s economic woes, saying that solving the grave economic crisis is his top priority. But Obama made many other promises in the name of “change” — expanding health-care coverage, improving education, devising an exit strategy for Iraq, shutting down Guantanamo Bay. Everyone wants to know which of these goals Obama will focus on when he takes office Jan. 20.
Mesa Verde among national parks threatened by EPA air-pollution rule change
Great Smoky Mountain National Park and the mountain range it protects were named for the natural fog that often enshrouds its peaks on the North Carolina-Tennessee border. But in recent years the nation’s most visited national park is called “Great Smoky” for another reason.
Conservation groups launch Western Slope anti-oil & gas billboard offensive
Even as the EPA eyes loosening air-quality standards for coal-fired power plants near national parks nationwide (including Mesa Verde in the Four Corners area), Colorado’s booming oil and gas industry is taking heat for its own impacts on air and water quality on the Western Slope.
Waxman ushers in new era for environmentalists
In Capitol Hill’s Rayburn office building, in the private chambers of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, hangs an enormous satellite photograph of the planet earth. Beneath the picture is a couch, where, according to sources familiar with the committee, long-time Chairman John Dingell is fond of sitting. From that couch, they say, the venerable Michigan Democrat, who has served for 53 years, has been known to point up to the photo and say, “That is the jurisdiction of this committee.”
How green is your bank? Climate Counts keeps score
HSBC Bank USA is the greenest bank in the land, according to the nonprofit Climate Counts organization, which provides consumer information based on the climate-change performance of businesses.
National media notice state’s pesky pine-beetle problem
Colorado’s rice-sized mountain pine beetle got some plus-sized publicity this week in The New York Times, likely causing a collective cringe on the part of the state’s ski industry and tourism officials.
Madeleine Pickens ponies up wild-horse adoption plan
Just call it the “Pickens Pony Plan.”
Jumping into an environmental issue with the same headline-grabbing gusto of her billionaire oil-man husband, Madeleine Pickens Monday rode in like the proverbial cavalry at a public meeting in Reno, Nev., on the mounting wild-horse crisis in the western United States.
New BLM oil shale regs draw fire from Salazar, environmental groups
As predicted by environmental groups in a Colorado Independent story last month, new federal regulations dictating government royalties for oil shale production on public lands in Colorado, Wyoming and Utah fall far short of fair compensation, numerous critics said Monday.
Enviros hungrily eye menu of conservation goodies under Obama administration
Besides revising or even rescinding Colorado’s controversial roadless rule, environmentalists are also targeting the Bureau of Land Management’s bitterly contested leasing for natural gas drilling on the Roan Plateau near Rifle as they make a wish list of conservation issues for the incoming Obama administration.
Western Slope pols look for energy industry to take voluntary tax hike
The oil and gas industry spent $10.8 million to bring about the Election Day defeat of Amendment 58, a measure that would have dramatically increased the severance tax the industry pays to the state for extracting resources from Colorado soil.
So it seems counter-intuitive that the industry would now voluntarily agree to pay even more severance tax, which in Colorado is currently the lowest among all major energy-producing states. But that’s exactly what key Western Slope lawmakers are hoping to accomplish in the coming months.